Friday, March 27, 2009

The recession is for real down, and some experts are saying that this could turn into a depression anytime soon.Whoever invested in the stock markets have burned themselves way above their fingers.I experienced what they call catching a falling knife when I reinvested everything around July August 2008 even though I exited at a good time earlier that year. And the job market is just horrible.

The US legislators are reaching for the throats of Immigrant workers and their visas, and free markets are re looking at their model.Never mind that the unemployment would have worse in the US if they had not outsourced a lot of their jobs thereby giving the developing countries a share of their unemployment.

All the jobs that have been shed in China and India would have been in the US but for outsourcing. Add to the fact that if they hadn't outsourced, their profits would have been even lesser or the losses more and that would have contributed to the job loss.

Back to India, the job losses are getting real. One of friends had bought a house on a monthly EMI of 50K and now he has been out of work for the past 4 months. There are rumors that some companies are having 25% salary cuts. Some have delayed or cancelled new hiring.

And friends and their friends never stop send me a resume or two every day. And these are all people with great academics and past performances, but hey are looking out at a time when people stick to where they are and no one is looking at their resume. The situation is bad, but when you write a resume that just don't stand out and which is 4 pages long, no one would look. Least of all in times like this when hiring is low, and there are lots of good people on bench.

But, that doesn't mean no one would hire. Many people won't know, but companies do look for people in times like this, because these are the times when great assets can be found without having to pay outrageous salary hikes. People get reasonable in times like this and these are the best times for talent acquisition. But how do you tell your potential recruiter that you are an Asset worth acquiring even in the bad times. You haven't even met your hiring manager? All he sees is an inbox full of potential candidates.

It is your resume that he sees before he decides to talk to your a position. And it is very important that you give an impression to the hiring personnel what kind of a person you are. Even before you have talked to him, you should have created a mental picture of yourself in his mind so that he remembers you from your resume.

It should be 1 page long, 2 at most and must tell in a few lines what you are capable of? The manager doesn’t actually want to read the description of your project but what you have achieved doing that project, what your MAJOR contributions were. You should also remember to mention all your pat achievements. That you stood first in a class of 80 should come clearly too.

And if you sound like what you written in the resume, then downturn or not you would have got the job!

Thursday, March 26, 2009

I was talking to one of friends who is an amateur naturopath but a professional evangelist of naturopathy and as usual he started talking about how he reduced 13 kilos (25 pounds?) And so we started talking about cooking food with lesser quantities of oil. And that you can actually lose 7-8 pounds by eating about 3-4 hours prior to going to bed. This was interesting, because you don't need to make a drastic change. Just start eating your dinner early early, which seem to be the first step towards a Healthy Eating style.

And it works in a very simple way. We all burn energy while we sleep, and if there are some food in the stomach while we sleep, then our body just uses that food, whereas if your food is already digested, it will try to get energy from your reserves thereby burning those extra calories.

Then we talked about salt and how harmful our daily intake of salt is since we do take a lot of salt. I wondered how am I going to manage without salt when he said that it just takes 10 days to get used to it. Start have lesser and lesser salt everyday and at the end of 10 days, you will not even feel it.

Another thing he suggested was to reduce out intake of processed food. We all do know that processed food has a lot of preservatives and other stuff that do no good for our body, but it also contains a lot of salt. Just because ordered the pizza with a discounted price using dominos coupons, it doesn't come with less fats. And I have been trying hard these past couple of days to not buy any more canned and processed food. And I am taking lesser oil. That is the least I can do since its been 4 months that i stopped going to the gym, that reminds me to start hitting the gym.. Ah... Why do we have to go through all these :)